Built Environments - your questions answered! video transcript

Hello, I'm Derek Spalton I'm a Civil Engineering lecturer here at Derby. I'm also the Programme Leader for the civil engineering undergraduate programmes. Well here at Derby we have a diverse  set of programmes. We do civil engineering, construction management and quantity surveying. For civil engineering we offer a BSc and a BEg. In civil engineering on the construction management side we offer a BSc and for the quantity surveying we do BSc in quantity surveying and commercial management. So we're looking for people who are interested in the construction on-site and managing those processes but we're also interested in people who want to go into the accounting side, the quantity surveying and also into the design side because civil engineers will be designing a lot of the projects so we've got a broad spectrum of where you can sit and within each discipline there are specialisms like facilities management, geotechnical engineering and engineering surveying. Well firstly for anybody who's coming in as a student all of our programmes in the built environment area are actually accredited by professional bodies so they're aligned to the relevant body within their industry. On top of that you're part of the Derby family so within the built environment, you're not just a shadow passing around in the corridor, you're not just a number, you're a student with a name which we understand your personality and we embed you into our community. Well here in the built environment we have pride ourselves on having links with industry so we've got several employers who year on year come back to us and want more of our students because they've proved successful and a lot of those students actually go on and get offered full-time jobs with these companies and at the moment we've got all the students who wanted to go on placement this year are on placement and we still have companies coming to  us offering us more placements.

Well the students that are coming here to Derby got the advantage that there's a new STEM building which has got well-equipped labs, like the one I'm currently in. Actually, on our doorstep, we've got large areas of land that the university owns so, we can do our surveying out there. When it comes to equipment we've got state-of-the-art commercial drones. We've got laser scanners. We've got ground-penetrating radar. We have lots of equipment for doing testing of atmospheres etc for healthy buildings. We've got all the facilities you need to allow you to flourish as you develop in your career. The opportunities you'll have here at Derby is that we have relationships with lots of employers and lots of charities and government bodies and we sometimes have opportunities to do project work. So last year a group of students and myself actually went to the Falkirk Wheel and we basically worked with Scottish canals to give them effectively a live brief to actually make a three-dimensional model of the Falkirk Wheel working with normal industrial standards, industrial health and safety practice which give them really good skills that they can transfer into the actual workplace when they've graduated and we've done all the projects for the Chatsworth estates we've scanned the Derwent Dam complex and the students get this to embrace the real community. The students here will be taught by the academic staff in the main and the academic staff have actually got industrial experience and on top of their industrial experience all the staff are qualified university lecturers with academic backgrounds and are doing research and all the staff are fellows of the Higher Education Academy but also on top of that, you'll also be taught by some of the researchers, so some people doing Ph.D.'s will be supporting your teaching. Well the students who study here at Derby will get both a theoretical academic set of studies but they'll also get the underpinning practical skills. When they go out into industry what they need to be able to do is to manage and communicate with diverse groups of people, the public, the labourers on-site plus clients but also they need to be able to communicate in different formats so as I've already said they'll need to be able to use AutoCAD, they need to be able to do basic surveying work, also on top of that the way we see it in Derby is that you're doing a big jigsaw because our industry is very diverse, there are lots of different pieces to the jigsaw and the skills that we give you the academic theory is like us giving you the lid with the picture on so it allows you to connect to all the pieces to end up with that full jigsaw as you work towards a flourishing future career.

Built Environments - your questions answered! video

Back to Built Environments